Regis College makes way for sculptor Nancy Schön

Sunday

Feb 12, 2017 at 7:00 AM

Nancy Olesin @WickedLocalArts

WESTON - Stopping to use a fine paintbrush to apply a little extra wax to a small maquette of one of her sculptures, artist Nancy Schön's blue eyes twinkled as she talked about the pieces chosen for a new exhibit, "Metamorphosis," of her work in the Carney Gallery at Regis College.

The delightful model that needed the touch-up, Eloise at the Plaza, was inspired by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight's popular children's books about the adventures of a 6-year-old who lives in a penthouse atop a New York City hotel. It depicts a young girl dressed in a short pleated skirt, bow in her hair, one hand on hip as she rests her other elbow on a chest-high Doric column.

She's just a few inches tall, but the precocious Eloise appears to be imparting some very important information to an inquisitive little dog and a long-necked turtle. Of course, now we'll have to read the book to find out what that scene's all about.

That's the thing about the art of Schön, of West Newton, who is best known for her whimsical Make Way for Ducklings sculpture that's graced Boston's Public Garden since 1987. Often joyful, her works inspire the viewer to read, study and find out more.

"I'm always learning," said the 89-year-old Schön, who was one of the founders, with Rosalita Ripaldi Shane and Randy Goldberger, of Framingham's Saxonville Studios artists group. The 1952 graduate of the Museum of Fine Arts Museum School - who plays tennis two or three times a week and swims to keep in shape - says her education gave her a grounding in art.

"The more you know, the more you can create," Schön said. "It's allowed me to be free."

So it's fitting that this exhibit was curated by three Regis students - Ashley Campbell, Brad Moore and Amanda-Elyse Cutter - as part of a class taught by assistant professor of Humanities Kate Edney titled "Museum Studies Practicum."

Campbell, a 21-year-old senior from Medway, Moore, a graduate student who also works in information technology at Regis, and Cutter, 22, a graduate student in Heritage Studies from Newton, visited Schön's home four times to interview her and scour the house looking for works to include in the exhibit that would illustrate the arc of the artist's career.

"We did it together. They came over and we went into the cellar and my attic," said Schön. It was a daunting task: there were sculptures in every room of the home through which to sift.

From a lifetime of work, the students chose 36 sculptures, and worked with the museum staff to organize, display and illuminate the pieces, as well as to write an exhibit catalog for "Metamorphosis."

"I've had many solo exhibits before," Schön said, "but this is the first time a catalog has been created for one of my exhibits."

Cutter, a graduate of Hofstra University, said working with Schön was "an extraordinary experience."

She said she had never before put together a museum show, and describing each of the sculptures for the exhibit's catalog was challenging but satisfying work. "We feel like we gave her something she's never had before," Cutter said.

Some of the works in the exhibit, which range from the late 1940s when Schön was a high school student, to 2017, are cast in plaster of Paris. "It was all I could afford at the time," Schön said. Others are made using poured concrete, but a few were made with lead.

"I didn't know any better, until friends quickly set me straight," Schön said. Today, most of her work is cast in highly durable bronze, including a butterfly that is the first thing visitors will see if they look up when entering the gallery.

It's a 2017 replica of Schön's Butterfly statue at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston that she designed to grace her own garden in West Newton. It very nicely fits in with the "Metamorphosis" theme of the show, which also happens to be the same name the college's Humanities department chose for its theme this academic year.

In the 1950s, early in her career, Schön made welded sculptures, including a demonic Mephistopheles, which she created at a retreat in New Hampshire where she and her husband Donald, a philosopher and professor of urban planning at MIT, were working to help build cabins. Made with found pieces welded together using an oxyacetylene torch, Schön said it was inspired by "a wild man" she met there who she really didn't like. The piece is part pitchfork, part chains, with an evil-looking saw-tooth mouth.

After Schön became a mother, many of her sculptures reflected her experiences with her own children, including Mother and Child and Joyous Moment, both undated pieces that are about the encompassing closeness mothers feel for their youngsters.

Her late husband's career - "he was everything to me," Schön said - meant the family moved around the country several times, including Kansas City, and Washington, D.C., in the 1960s where Donald Schön worked for the Commerce Department during the Kennedy administration. Schön calls Trash Man and Cleaning Lady, both created during that time, "my protests pieces."

Both sculptures depict African Americans who work at hard physical jobs, and reflect Schön's feelings of despair at the fact that people do such difficult work for low pay. Cast in bronze, Schön used pinched clay to form the textural surfaces of the models for the pieces. At once, one can almost feel the tiredness yet dogged determination of hardworking people.

Schön is most well-known for her depictions of animals, and the students were sure to include her favorite sculpture, Reflective Giraffe Family, from around 2010, which shows the love of her family. "My husband was 6-foot-4 and he thought of himself as a giraffe," Schön said in the catalog notes.

Also in the exhibit is a template for a bronze plaque that commemorates a replica Schön made of Make Way for Ducklings for Raisa Gorbachev - the wife of then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev - that's in Moscow's Novodevitchy Park. The sculpture of Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings, inspired by Robert McCloskey's children's story, was a gift from then-first lady Barbara Bush in response to the START strategic arms reduction treaty that the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed in 1991.

Although the Russian Make Way for Ducklings sculpture has been vandalized several times and Mrs. Mallard and several of the eight babies were once stolen, they were replaced and repaired and the whimsical piece still stands as an ambassador for the United States in Moscow, Schön said.

But there are no Ducklings in this Regis exhibit, which is a more studious reflection of Schön's eclectic subject choices over the years and her wish to have a new outlook on her art each day.

Using the words of her favorite Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, Schön said, "One can never step in the same river twice. Every day we can start with a new mindset."